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Vote: More Reaper of Souls Six-Piece Sets?During yesterday’s Tavern Talk developer live chat, the guys mentioned something they talked about at Blizzcon last year; improving the old Diablo 3 five piece class sets and adding another item to each (technically, IK is already 6, Inna’s, Natalya’s, Tal Rasha’s, and Zunimassas are 5) to make them comparable with the newer, more powerful […]

Reaper of Souls Patch 2.2.0 PreviewBlizzard has posted a juicy preview of the features coming up in Patch 2.2.0, which they say will be coming to the PTR “soon.” According to past planning statements, we should expect this to be the game mode that goes live after Season Two ends, and which we’ll be playing when Season Three starts up, […]

Follower Gear and Respecs

I wasn’t going to news about this Blue post, but as there are new and returning Diablo III players around every day, and you never know what other people know (or don’t know) I think it’s worth a post. I’ve got a whole big post about ideal Follower gear in the works, basically condensing/expanding on the info in this awesome thread, but just for today, here’s the Blue:

I’m a wizard I play with a kiting build and I want to start working on my follower. First off which one would best fit a kiting build, and should I equip xp and magic find items on him? I’m not sure what to put on them at all in fact – straight dps? I have no idea – elaborate anyone?Grimiku: I recently geared my follower for Magic Find since it was not only what I was looking for, but also the easiest to gear up.

Sometimes it’s not just identifying the role you want your follower to fulfill, but also remembering that the measurement of their success will be proportionate to the quality of gear you can give them.

Is there anyway we can also make respecs on follower talents? I made some mistakes with my enchantress that I wish I could undo. Also, it would promote experimentation.Grimiku: If you right click on your follower’s portrait in the upper left hand corner of your screen there is a “retrain” button just for this purpose.

As the blue said, you just right click on your Follower’s portrait to get some options, and one of them is retrain, which respecs all of their skills to nothing, and you can then reset them to whatever you like. I assumed everyone had noticed that just through the course of playing, but like I said a minute ago, you never know what other people don’t know.

The Demon and the Eirena.

As for follower equipment, it’s possible to gear them up enough to actually deal useful damage, but that takes fantastic equipment, and if you’ve got the budget to kit your Followers out that well, you’re probably doing so much damage yourself that it’s irrelevant. For the rest of us, a popular trick is to give the Scoundrel a great slowing debuff by equipping him with an xbow with cold damage (like the Buriza) or granting him cold damage from jewelry (Tal’s Allegiance or an SoJ can roll with cold). Or just have fun by giving your Enchantress a Maximum sword and watch the giant demon stomp around, dragging Eirena along at the other end of a glowing fire chain.

I like to give my Follower’s vitality gear, which is nice since I find that constant death on their parts really cuts down on the number of CCs and debuffs they’re able to inflict. Other than vitality, since their damage is seldom high enough to matter, it’s more about giving them gear that helps you, and that means Magic Find/Gold Find, or +experience, since 1/5 of those bonuses share to your character. Only those properties, though. You can’t put 25% critical hit chance on a Follower and get 5% for yourself, alas.

So it’s just MF or GF for them, and yeah, you only get 20% of that bonus, but it’s not hard to get 100% MF on a Templar between two rings, the amulet, and the shield, and that’s 20% more MF for you. Seven Paragon levels worth of MF is nothing to sneeze at.

Experience bonus gear on the Follower also shares at 20%, including the Hellfire ring. That’s all +experience gear, the +per kill and +% per kill, but in the late game there’s really no point in worrying about the non-percentage type, since monsters grant thousands of exp per kill and another 10 or 20 on top of that is irrelevant. Much less 1/5 of that, if the bonus shares from your Follower. Thus, since you can not equip two of the same legendary item, a Hellfire ring and a Leoric’s Signet is the best option. Good luck finding them.